Craft post.1!

For Christmas, I embroidered some pocket squares for Wystan. I downloaded a font from the internet, installed it on my computer all by myself, and then made up a way to embroider. I got more daring with the colors in the last three.

Green Dresses.4

I haven't posted green dress pictures in far, far too long.

Merry Christmas in Slovak

Guestblog: Whigwham's Advent Reflection

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing. --Gospel of John, chapter six

The Spirit hath done much for our salvation, by means of the flesh. --St. Augustine

In the words of His disciples, Jesus' teaching in the Bread of Life discourse is "a hard saying; who can hear it?" In this passage of the Gospel of John, we find Jesus repeatedly insisting that His followers eat His flesh and drink His blood, lest they have no life in Him. What could this possibly mean?

In an effort to ease the force of this strange command, one possible response is to cite the verse above. After Jesus claims that His followers must eat His flesh, He goes on to tell them that the flesh profiteth nothing. Thus, in His previous words about eating His flesh, surely Jesus must have been speaking figuratively. Crisis averted.

Not so fast, interjects St. Augustine: "Join the spirit to the flesh, and it profiteth much: for if the flesh profited not, the Word would not have become flesh, and dwelt among us. The Spirit hath done much for our salvation, by means of the flesh."

Augustine argues that when Jesus states that the "flesh profiteth nothing," surely He must be referring to His flesh as considered apart from His spirit ("a carcass that was to be cut up and sold in the shambles, not of a body animated by the spirit"). Indeed, had Jesus been insisting that His followers eat His lifeless corpse, such a thing would be profitless. On the contrary, Augustine points out, Jesus was insisting that His followers eat of His living flesh. Of course, the logic behind Augustine's interpretation is that if Christ had meant that His living flesh profited nothing, then His Incarnation itself would be rendered profitless. And Christmas would be meaningless. For what is the Incarnation if not a resounding affirmation of the profit which the flesh can indeed bring?

We are left then with an inkling of why Jesus would ask His followers to eat His flesh and drink His blood--a seemingly bizarre request. Somehow the Christmas mystery is involved. As St. Hilary explains, "This then is our principle of life. While we are in the flesh, Christ dwelleth in us by His flesh. And we shall live by Him, according as He liveth." Christ wants to indwell His followers completely. This entails not only a spiritual indwelling--Christ's spirit dwelling in our soul--but a physical one. Because we are embodied creatures, Christ also wants His flesh to indwell our flesh. "The Word," Augustine writes, "being the principle of life in all things, having taken up soul and body, cleanseth the souls and bodies of those who believe."

Thus, the Eucharist is the completion of the Christmas mystery. We humans are made of body, blood, and soul. The Word became flesh and then sought--indeed, seeks--to indwell us body, blood, and soul--and divinity.

And this last Reality of His indwelling is the reason why Christ's flesh is no ordinary flesh. As Blessed Theophylact writes, "For it is not the flesh of man simply, but of God: and it makes man divine, by inebriating him, as it were, with divinity." This call--that of theosis--is indeed the essence of the Christmas spirit.

Travels

I hadn't been back to Grove City since my graduation more than four years ago. Also, fortunately, I hadn't thought of our [terrible, terrible] alma mater even once. Now you, dear reader, must think about it with me:

Verse 1:
Midst the Pines in Columns Growing
By the Stream So Gently Flowing
Dear To Hearts With Memories Glowing
Stand the Halls, the Halls We Love
Dear To Hearts With Memories Glowing
Stand the Halls, the Halls We Love

Chorus:
Hail To Thee, Our Alma Mater
Praises from Each Son and Daughter
Pledges of Love and Honor
Grove City Still Shall Own
Pledges of Love and Honor
Grove City Still Shall Own

Verse 2:
Though the Land and Sea May Part Us
Far Remove Thy Towers and Campus
Staunch and True, There Dwells within Us
All the Spirit of Thy Life
Staunch and True, There Dwells within Us
All the Spirit of Thy Life

Goodness gracious--and I rave about Christmas decorations these days...











HT: Wystan, from Endangered Durham.

Catagories of Movies I Most Hate

Sisters-sleeping-with-the-same-guy movies:

Sargent and the Sea

I meant to but never blogged about seeing the exhibit, Sargent and the Sea, at the Corcoran Gallery with Hopkins last week.

Not only did Sargent paint gorgeous portraits of wealthy women in luxurious dresses (he is a master of painting fabric






















), but he also painted many marine subjects, particularly early in his career.

Something that stuck out to me from the exhibit was the way in which he painted the same scene in two slightly, but noticeably different ways.

















Of course it's hard to tell from these pictures of the two paintings, but evidently one was painted in the style that was popular in his day (which is also a good deal bigger than the other one). The other was painted in a more cutting-edge style. He exhibited them in different exhibits. How masterful and clever! These pictures are called, "En route pour la peche" or "Setting out to fish"; and "Fishing for Oysters at Cancale."

Travels: Greetings from the Other Washington

Serendipity and the Internet

three white leopards are hard to run away from--It sounds like this googler has either has some interesting personal experiences or else some really bad dreams.

coolest school mascot--

Well, it depends on what you mean by coolest. If you mean oddest, then I think that the Midland Michigan Chemics are in the running (the town is a Dow Chemical town, from what I hear).









Also, the Biglerville, PA Canners. I guess Canner is supposed to refer to the apples that are good enough to be canned, as opposed to the ones that are used for juice. I've heard that they have a tough time finding someone to wear the mascot costume at sporting events.








Although it isn't a school mascot, but a town mascot, the Dillsburg Pickle is noteworthy. Residents complain that it looks like a less attractive Mr. Peanut.







I have, in a past year, been invited to see the Pickle Drop--Dillsburg's New Year's Eve tradition.










All of these very interesting and odd mascots aside, I will of course now recommend to you the actual coolest mascot--the Williamsport Millionaire. Classy, sophisticated, American. What more could you want from a mascot?






leopards pray--At the very least, they pray before every meal. See also praying mantises.






















where would 3 white leopards sit--Seating assignments are always important at dinner parties. I am always attentive to this, although I don't always know what is best. It is important to vary louder people with those who are less loud. It is also important to vary men and women. The hostess also often needs quick access to the kitchen. All that to say, it depends on the circumstances.

leopards turn into man -eater? give reasons--1. Man began to destroy leopards' natural environment, and the leopards wanted to save it. 2. Women don't taste as good. 3. The leopards wanted to introduce more variety into their diet.

I have no epigraph for my dissertation proposal! I feel like a third- or fourth-rate academic, if there even is such a thing.

I love The Sartorialist:









































Plus I sort of love the democratic approach to fashion that fashion blogging encourages.

Fr. Schall on Materialism at Christmas

"A student of mine recently wrote an e-mail to me in which he told me that he was going to celebrate Christmas but not its 'materialism.' I humorously, but seriously, told him that Christmas is, in fact, the very feast of 'materialism,' that is what it is about. It is about the goodness of material things, perhaps especially the goodness of human babies. The Incarnation and the Nativity are precisely those dogmas that once and for all refute the ever recurring Manichean tendency to look upon matter as evil.

The 'materialism' that we often associate with Christmas – the stores, the tinsel, the glitter, the hassle – is after all the other side of what it means to be in a body and in time. We Christians do not in the least object to giving gifts, to decorations, to understanding what it is all about. We invented such ideas. Like anything else, there can be an excess, but in the very core of the idea of festivity, as Josef Pieper pointed, there is this sense of abundance and excess, of overflowing and more than we can imagine. The paradigm of this understanding is seen in its fullest glory at the Nativity, at Christmas. Gloria in excelsis Deo."

More here.

Problems of my life:

How to get lemon zest out of the holes in the finest part of the grater.

How to get un-addicted from my cell phone game (it's like tetras, only way cooler).

How to psyche myself to revise, yet again, my dissertation proposal (I'm sick of the thing already).

How to convince my computer to quit over-heating and shutting down.

Hopkins is Wonderful

Proof:









And a bonus: the Little Gidding mini Christmas tree.

From the wise and charming and tall Monsignor Sokolowski:

"Human thinking occurs most specifically in the medium of speech, but it can also be exercised in depiction, dance, and music; there can be as much intelligence in a portrait or a landscape as in an essay, each of which has its own kind of syntax. Thinking also occurs in the rationalized motions we call sport and in the patterned conduct we call games. Playing tennis and playing poker are exercises of reason, and they have their syntax too. Thinking occurs in the establishment of political societies and the performance of political actions, and it occurs further in acts of courage, justice, and friendship, in the fabrication of roads, bridges, and houses, and in the medical treatment of an illness. It occurs in a distinctive way in the pursuit of mathematical science and the technology derived from it. These are all exercises of reason, and words function at the heart of them all, even though they are not reducible to words."

--Christian Faith and Human Understanding

This man is one of the most crystal clear thinkers/speakers.

The Worst Part

...of being a graduate student is that applications *never* end. Alas. Particularly annoying essay question: "This statement should address your career goals, with particular emphasis on where you expect to be in 5, 10, and 20 years." At this point, my career goals are not different for me for 5, 10 and 20 years: in all of them, I would like to be teaching at a university.

So this is what I wrote: "I hope to finish my studies and then begin to teach in a university within the next five years. I plan to remain in academia; ideally in ten years I will be finishing up my second book. Twenty years from now is a bit of a stretch for my imagination—I do know, however, that I hope to have white hair by that time."

On Evaluation Inflation

You know, teachers are talking all the time about grade inflation, but I've never heard anyone talk about evaluation inflation.

Some students and I were talking tonight about the phenomenon of professors being evaluated by their students. There are silly things that professors do to get better evaluations (grade the first paper easily and the second one much harder, but after you've already received your evaluations). Some professors' raises hang on student evaluations (one student told about a professor who brings a photograph of his wife and kids and sets it out during the evaluations). Suddenly, the professors are being forced to cater to their students, students who don't always yet know what's good for them. Alas, the democratization of education. It seems to me that education is exactly the sort of thing that ought not be democratized.

I Think Tocqueville Would Approve

Clever, clever man. I approve, too. I give you bits from P.G. Wodehouse's "The Alarming Spread of Poetry" (do read the whole thing):

"To the thinking man there are few things more disturbing than the realization that we are becoming a nation of minor poets.
...
On a sunny afternoon down in Washington Square one's progress is positively impeded by the swarms of young poets brought out by the warm weather.
...
And, as if matters were not bad enough already, along comes Mr. Edgar Lee Masters and invents _vers libre_.
...
All those decent restrictions which used to check poets have vanished, and who shall say what will be the outcome?
...
Who can say where this thing will end? _Vers libre_ is within the reach of all. A sleeping nation has wakened to the realization that there is money to be made out of chopping its prose into bits.
...
Probably the only hope lies in the fact that poets never buy other poets' stuff. When once we have all become poets, the sale of verse will cease or be limited to the few copies which individual poets will buy to give to their friends."

Don't miss the part of the essay where he translates some Longfellow into free verse.

Here Wodehouse is really getting at the same thing that Dana Gioia is getting at in his essay, "Can Poetry Matter?," which laments the increasing way in which poetry turns in on itself, rather than engaging with society more broadly. And, need I point out, all of this meshes quite neatly with what Tocqueville has to say on the subject (which I think may be pure genius).

Eliot on Politics and Poetry

Eliot on Shelley in "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism":

"We may now return to the question of how far it is possible to enjoy Shelley's poetry without approving the use to which he put it; that is, without sharing his views and sympathies. Dante, of course, was about as thoroughgoing didacticist as one could find; and I have maintained elsewhere, and still maintain, that it is not essential to share Dante's beliefs in order to enjoy his poetry. If in this instance I may appear to be extending the tolerance of a biased mind, the example of Lucretius will do as well: one may share the essential beliefs of Dante and yet enjoy Lucretius to the full. Why then should this general indemnity not extend to Wordsworth and to Shelley?

...

We may be permitted to infer, in so far as the distaste of a person like myself for Shelley's poetry is not attributable to irrelevant prejudices or to a simple blind spot, but is dues to a peculiarity in the poetry and not in the reader, that it is not the presentation of beliefs which I do not hold, or--to put the case as extremely as possible--of beliefs that excite my abhorrence, that makes the difficulty. Still less is it that Shelley is deliberately making use of his poetic gifts to propagate a doctrine; for Dante and Lucretius did the same thing. I suggest that the position is somewhat as follows. When the doctrine, theory, belief, or 'view of life' presented in a poem is one which the mind of the reader can accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of experience, it interposes no obstacle to the reader's enjoyment, whether it be one that he accept or deny, approve or deprecate. When it is one which the reader rejects as childish or feeble, it may, for a reader of well-developed mind, set up an almost complete check. I observe in passing that we may distinguish, but without precision, between poets who employ their verbal, rhythmic and imaginative gift in the service of ideas which they hold passionately, and poets who employ the ideas which they hold with more or less settled conviction as material for a poem; poets may vary indefinitely between these two hypothetical extremes, and at what point we may place any particular poet must remain incapable of exact calculation. And I am inclined to think that the reason why I was intoxicated by Shelley's poetry at the age of fifteen, and now find it almost unreadable, is not so much that at that age I accepted his ideas, and have since come to reject them, as that at that age 'the question of belief or disbelief', as Mr. Richards pits it, did not arise. It is not so much that thirty years ago I was able to read Shelley under an illusion which experience has dissipated, as that because the question of belief or disbelief did not arise I was in a much better position to enjoy the poetry. I can only regret that Shelley did not live to put his poetic gifts, which were certainly of the first order, at the service of more tenable beliefs--which need not have been, for my purposes, beliefs more acceptable to me."

Theater and Politics.2

"The most useful poetry, socially, would be the one which could cut across all the present stratifications of public taste--stratifications which are perhaps a sign of social disintegration. The ideal medium for poetry, to my mind, and the most direct means of social 'usefulness' for poetry, is the theatre. ... [A poet] would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it."

--Eliot, "The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism"

Lawrence, On Teaching Section

(He was a teaching fellow for some sort of theology class.)

"At the end of the section, I had everyone go around the room and denounce one thing. We had denunciations of Emmanuel Kant, protestants, catholics, various heretics, and one person who couldn't think of anything because she wasn't prepared 'to be this empowered!' "

(Lawrence's philosophy of life is denunciation. In fact, he once titled a paper on Augustine, "Quid Tria?: Why Heretics Are Necessary [Or, In Defense of the Art of Denunciation].")

Also, Lawrence is engaged! And he got that way with the help of a Dante sonnet!

It's true.

Dinner Party.8

Two fun things about tonight:

1) Best. appetizer. ever.--We made the MRE that Diana's husband so generously gave us. The instructions are very complicated. The diagram of "Energy," "Food" and "High Performance!" with little triangles in no particular arrangement was delightful. Whigwham particularly liked the wheat bread with a cheese-bacon spread.

2) The wine needed to breathe and we had no carafe, so we made one out of a vase. Yes, we served wine at dinner out of a vase.

I keep thinking about The Girls of Slender Means. The conversion of Nicholas seems to be the central thing in the book (or at least a central thing). And yet it is also very vague--I can't tell exactly why he converts. Is it the murder that he sees in the press of people at the victory gathering in front of Buckingham palace? Or, more likely, is it the nostalgic avoidance of reality of some of the members of the May of Teck Club?

And then the question is, is the vagueness of this central aspect of the book an error on the part of the author? Or is it a point in itself? It's possible that the oblique way that Sparks alludes to Nicholas' conversion points to the ineffability of conversion.

MIley Cyrus - Party In The U.S.A. - Official Music Video (HD)

Guestblog: Whigwham on Miley Cyrus, Party in the USA

I generally can't stand Miley, but this song is an interesting take on the ubiquitous and homogeneous aspects of American pop music. When I drove across the country back in college, it struck me how I could listen to the very same song on the radio, whether I was in Ohio, South Dakota, Wyoming, or Washington State. This is of course more than a little disturbing, and it's the very thing that Miley is celebrating. On the other hand, this poses an interesting question.

Like it or not, the political paradigm par excellence of modernity is the nation-state. This is difficult because the nation-state is oftentimes forced to shoulder more than it can reasonably be expected to bear. For example, on the books, modern democratic states are technically simply instrumental mechanisms to secure individual human rights (life, property, etc.). However, we democratic citizens invest much more significance into these states, so much so that it even makes sense for us to die for them. If we didn't invest this extra significance in states--over and above what they're technically due as instrumental rights protectors--then it would make about as much sense to die for your country as it would to die for the post office (MacIntyre's wonderful example).

So the modern nation-state finds itself in the unenviable position of asking from its citizens more allegiance than it can technically justify. What can help the nation-state in its difficult task? Enter ubiquitous/homogeneous pop music. A meager force at first glance, but the phenomenon which Miley sings about is indeed a powerful force. Is it possible that one of the things that makes a soldier from Alabama willing to die for a civilian in LA the fact that we can all appreciate Taylor Swift?

IYAZ- Replay

Guestblog: Whigwham on Iyaz, Replay

Editor: Evidently, Whigwham is Three White Leopards' resident pop music commentator.

This song is hilarious. I love the similes. Interesting lyric: "Doin' things I never do; I'm in the kitchen cookin' things she likes."

This made me wonder. We can speak of things like gender differences and the differences in role they bring about, and presumably these differences regulate or "channel" the flow of romantic love. However, what if love itself has a tendency to "overflow," or even invert, gender roles and differences? In other words, is it a coincidence that Iyaz cooks for Shawty?